Received a few email questions about how to maximize DPS on Burning Tendons (20 second DPS burn), so here’s a quick FAQ. (Also see the thread on the forums about it, which has several great contributions. Most of this blog post is ripping off Stenhaldi’s thoughts on the subject.)

Glyphs: Rip, Savage Roar, Bloodletting. (Tendon’s not up for enough time for Berserk glyph, TF glyph doesn’t help and desyncs trinkets.)

Trinkets: Slot 1) A good on-use trinket. Kiroptyric Sigil is best option, but a PvP clicky or even Ancient Petrified Seed can work. Slot 2) Wrath of Unchaining, preferably, if not, whatever else you have. Don’t use two on-use trinkets, as the second one will not be usable until the buff from the first drops. (and yes, this means engineering is somewhat penalized since they won’t get any benefit from Synapse Springs.)

Reforging: Cap hit, then crit. Mastery and haste are significantly worse. (edit: do NOT reforge for expertise, thanks Reesi; edit2: According to Tangedyn and Tinderhoof, haste isn’t as good as I had originally calculated it.)

Pre-Tendon: Get a Savage Roar and Stampede up off a corruption or blood.

Rotation: (Mangle), (FF), Trinket/Rake, Ravage!, Shred, TF/Trinket/Berserk/Rip. (You can waste some TF energy here if necessary.) Continue with Shred/FB, make sure you get a Ravage! in. Using Rake a 2nd time is probably not worth it, but pretty close DPS-wise if you get it in during TF. Final GCD should be an FB, but only if you have 5 CP’s, otherwise just Shred. Potion, obviously, though this is probably coordinated by your RL. If you have a 20s proc trinket, pop it at the beginning instead of with TF.

Is FF worth it in 10m if I’m the only melee DPS? Yes, but the difference is fairly small.

Rip? Really? Yes, assuming you get it up in time. 1 FB = ~3.5 Rip ticks on average. So, even if you’re slow starting, still use Rip unless there’s less than 9s remaining when you get to 5 cps.

Think that about covers everything; feel free to ask a question or share your experiences in the comments.

i didnt reforge away from my usual hit/exp>mastery>haste>crit setup. thata because im required to tank the amalgamation für the third plate and wont be doing damage to the tendon when it matters most anyways.
oh, we were at 5% on the second burst on the third tendon pre nerf and downed it yesterday :]

Engineering is actually still an advantage since even if you get only 3-5 seconds of it (by casting it after the 15 second sigil buff expires), that’s still a much larger average effect than any other profession.

Er, actually at 3 seconds it’s at a disadvantage. Only an average agility gain at 4-5 seconds, and even then it might not increase damage if overall damage is sufficiently biased toward the beginning of the burn.

I’m somewhat curious how the patch has impacted Vial’s viability vs. Compass.. on this fight alone, the Sigil seems to have some merit but overall I’ve been uncertain how to juggle 5-6 different trinkets. The changes to vial in this patch only make me scratch my head harder.

Even if you are required to Tank/OT for this fight you don’t need 8% hit and 26 expertise. All of the targets in this encounter are boss level 87 (not 88). You can reforge the extra hit/exp into a different stat :)

Yes, I did test this with Mew by moving several hundred points around the Mihir 410 profile into different stats and comparing DPS. Unfortunately, I didn’t keep the notes that went into it. Now that you’ve both raised the issue, I’ve done some quick retesting (don’t have the time to be extensive at the moment) and my results are definitely questionable, so I’ll edit the post.

I question the use of bloodletting glyph over berserk. Assuming you get 20 seconds on the tendon, rip’s minimum duration of 16 seconds, and a minimum of 4 gcds to put up a rip (16 seconds left at this point), which is 1 full rip.

Now, there are most likely 2 burn phases per tendon. One with berserk and one without, as well as the varying HP per. The first burn will start at 100% hp, and more than likely end under 50%, and the other starting at under 50% without berserk. For the first burn, it is more than likely possible to extend the duration of rip with a BitW under 60%, making absolutely sure that not a single tick of rip will go wasted. Under 50%, the burn without a berserk, will have BitW already active, causing bloodletting to be far less valuable.

However, we can check how valuable the glyph of berserk will actually be. Assuming it’s used 3 seconds in on the first burn, you can maybe get an extra 2 of the 10 seconds out of it, which will probably equal an extra shred or two over it being unglyphed, versus 1 extra rip tick extension if you don’t FB at all.

You only get 18 sec on the tendon, so Berserk shouldn’t run out within this time frame (since you need a couple GCD’s to use up energy and not waste the 60 energy refund) and quite frankly Rip doesn’t need extending either because it takes more than 2 sec to put it up. So really the only truly useful glyphs are Rip and SR.

If you’re useing Kiril, try to sync it with tendon appearance. You can do this via re-equipp infight (which resets the icd so make sure there is at least 1minute left to tendon spawn) or just stop attacking after 50sec.